This invention relates to a video display apparatus and method, and more particularly, is suitably applied to a television receiver.
Television receivers have been proposed which sequentially store video data of channels that users are watching in built-in memories after compressing and encoding the video data, and read, decode and display the video data from the built-in memories on monitors in accordance with users' playback commands (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 8-237592).
With such television receivers, the users are able to watch past scenes that the users may have missed or the like. In this description, the display of past scenes is called a replay display.
Such television receivers, however, execute the replay display only for about a dozen seconds based on the video data stored in the built-in memories. This causes the problem that users cannot create archives containing scenes that they like by storing the video data and cannot remove the data from the television receivers.
As another problem, users cannot search the stored video to find user-desired scenes.
If television receivers with such a replay display function can allow users to create archives containing user-desired scenes, to remove the archives from the television receiver, and to search video replayed for user-desired scenes, the television receivers can have significantly improved functionality.